Praise for Bluest Nude
In this frequently gripping debut, Codjoe offers precisely crafted poems dealing with desire, memory, art, and ancestry.-Publishers Weekly, starred review
Fiercely intelligent and both emotionally and formally rich.-Library Journal
The hotly burning poems in Codjoe's debut collection collapse themes of color and body into a lyrical supernova.-Booklist, starred review
Bluest Nude is a heady mix of ekphrastic and archival poems...Codjoe conjures the unmistakable textures of Black Americana.-Layla Benitez-James, Poetry Foundation
If seeing were easy, we wouldn't need poetry. That's one of the implications of Ama Codjoe's startling debut, Bluest Nude. The poems are portraits-glimpses-of a poet who wants 'to be seen clearly or not at all.'... [Bluest Nude is] steeped brilliantly in the urgency of the contemporary hunger to know what we really are. There's a quiet joy possible, too, in that difficult pursuit.-Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's
Bluest Nude insists on the personal. Codjoe's 'I' is vibrant and alive, clear in its existence as an individuated lens. Wonderfully, this foregrounding of the first-person does not prohibit a sense of a collective, but rather enforces it.-Los Angeles Review of Books
Bluest Nude is a portrait of Black female desire and embodied love that will leave you closer to your own core. Codjoe uses a language so emotionally clear and nourishing that I felt physically hungry for it.-The Common
Bluest Nude is a sensual, seductive, and luminous collection of poetry that draws the reader in with tenderness, vulnerability, and desire. These poems simultaneously satisfy while leaving you with an aching need for more.
-Christine Bollow, Between Drafts
How beautifully seen, tended, and rendered are our many Black lives under this poet's exquisite gaze. In appetite and loss, rage and praise, what animates these poems is a profound cherishing, an abiding (and yet at every turn surprising) love rushing out from the lush wilderness of Ama Codjoe's rapturous imagination. Bluest Nude is an ecstatic encounter.-Tracy K. Smith
Sensual, sound-driven, and brimming with a necessary truth, the poems in Bluest Nude are pulsating with both grief and beauty. Wrought out of resurrection and reclaiming, these brilliant poems honor the mystery and legacy of the body. Codjoe has written a true triumph of a debut that feels urgent and deeply human.-Ada Limon
It is hard to find words for the fineness of Ama Codjoe's poetry, its unabashed and luminous vibrancy. She unframes old myths about beauty and femininity and care to bring them intimately into the experience of the body where she forges far more supple visions. Her language is so rich and resourceful that, as it enlarges lyric possibilities, it also enlarges human ones. Never have I been so convinced that the desire to know oneself and the desire to be the agent of one's own radical self-making can be audacious and brilliant collaborators.-Mary Szybist
Codjoe's poems made me ache in the best way. These poems call forward our many mothers-in pictures and pages-they create a vibrant salon pulsing with the confidence of a poet's urgent, material response. Exquisitely balanced between premonition and memory, Bluest Nude is a gathering and conjuring of improvisation and reflection, sensuality and joy, call and response.-Ellen Gallagher
Praise for Ama Codjoe
Yes, listen. Listen. Ama Codjoe's writing is too eloquent not the hear.-Ed Roberson, from the introduction to Blood of the Air
At the heart of Codjoe's poems in her first chapbook, Blood of the Air, is a real heart, pumping, working the blood of life-good blood, bad blood-out. . . . Codjoe's poems, her re-framings, are full of care and kindness for the speakers of the poems, imagined or not, in their reveries, in their vulnerabilities, in their angers. The quieter poems press your hand with such intention when they skip-never a surprise CD skip from an accidental scratch; a practiced boxer's skip.-Adroit Journal
Codjoe's poetry offers a brief, powerful intersection where the subjects of her poems illustrate how some issues recur again and again throughout the human experience. In times like these, when blood and air are porous elements that we fear, we see how they are ancient and necessary, too.-Tara Betts
Codjoe's extraordinary debut poetry chapbook, Blood of the Air, conveys a sense of urgency, vulnerability, and Codjoe's mastery of the poetic craft. . . . Blood of the Air explores narratives of women and women figures who have lived, lost, resisted, been subject to breaking and other people's definitions, and who have reclaimed their breaths and freedom.-Nadia Alexis
